Thursday, September 30, 2010

Cubans line up in front of a Havana Internet Café on Obispo street in Old Havana.

Fidel Castro has gone from Cuba’s commander in chief to its de facto “blogger-in-chief,” posting constant opinion columns online,
singing the praises of the internet age, even hailing Wikileaks and
sites like it as the common man’s tool to greater worldwide
transparency.

Now, if only his fellow Cubans could get in on the cyber-party.

Less than 3 percent of islanders used the internet at least once over
the past year and only about 6 percent used email, according to a
nationwide survey released Thursday by the state-run National Office of
Statistics.
Cuba has long published annual statistics on its internet and cell
phone users. But the level of detail contained in this survey had not
been made public before – and it revealed a country astoundingly behind
the technological times.

Just 2.9 percent of survey responders said they had used the internet
in the past 12 months, and the majority of those did so at work or
school – not from home. Cuba only legalised the sale of computers to the
general public in 2008, though they were, and still are, widely
available on the black market.

The tally paints a far bleaker
picture than the statistics office’s annual report on connectivity,
which found that Cuba had 1.6 million internet users last year. But even
that is far below internet access in any other country in Latin America, according to international surveys.

Statistics officials based their study on interviews with 38,000
households across the island from February to April. The office did not
say whether the survey was done in person or over the phone, and it listed the margin of error only as less than five percentage points.

It was not clear how many Cubans themselves would see the statistics, however, since they were posted on the agency’s website.

The communist government severely limits Web access, but says it has
no choice given that Washington’s 48-year-old embargo doesn’t allow Cuba
to access US service providers located close by. Instead, the island
must rely on slow and costly Internet via satellite from Europe and
other faraway locales.

Meanwhile, authorities block blogs that are critical of the
government as well as other pages containing content that is considered counter to Castro’s 1959 revolution.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has promised to lay a fibre-optic
cable from his country to Cuba to improve connectivity here, but those
plans have been stalled for years.

Of those surveyed by the National Office of Statistics, only 5.8 percent said they use e-mail. The survey did not say how often.

Ordinary Cubans can join an islandwide network that allows them to send and receive international e-mail, but lines are long at youth clubs, post offices and the few Internet cafes that provide access.

The survey also found that just 2.6 percent of respondents regularly
use cell phones, despite the government’s dramatic lifting of bans on
them two years ago. That was slightly higher than the 2.5 percent who
said they own cell phones or have been issued them for work _ meaning
some are using phones that belong to relatives, friends or neighbours.

Those percentages are substantially lower than previously released
figures, with the state-controlled telecommunications monopoly reporting
in July that more than 1 million cell phone lines were in use
nationwide. Cuba has a population of 11.2 million people.

Mobile phones in Cuba had been
prohibited for all but tourists and foreigners, some government
employees, business officials and academics. But in April 2008, just two
months after he succeeded his brother as president, Raul Castro
authorized their sale to all who could afford them.